"Apparently, most people are willing to touch an object they've never seen before and this invoked a worm script that was designed to multiply and spread across the 2,700+ servers run by Linden Labs in California, the game's owner. Many of the six hundred thousand active users experienced serious lag and lost connectivity to the servers, making it one of the largest known denial-of-service attacks in an online game."The Wired blog entry is pretty funny - particularly the picture of the little kid who has been spreading the goo that is getting these netizens riled up, but the amazing thing about this story is the amount of real money people make and spend in this online virtual world.
The October 28, 2006 article in Something Awful - The Internet Makes You Stupid by Chris "Petey" Peterson has some interesting (and pretty funny) stuff about Second Life. Asked to describe this online world he gives these three features -
Take someone and deprive them of any sort of "real" social contact.He says when he wrote the article, Second Lifers had spent $494,196 in the last 24 hours on virtual goods that have no tangible worth outside of Linden Labs, and that a prominent Second Life landlord named Anshe Chung makes over six figures a year just buying and selling virtual land.
Give them the ability to script any program, animate any action, or build any object through intuitive processes.
Allow them to own their creations, and to sell them to the highest bidder.
From the Oct 19, 2006 New York Times on Second Life -
"The “people” there make friends, build homes and run businesses. They also play sports, watch movies and do a lot of other familiar things. They even have their own currency, convertible into American dollars.
But residents also fly around, walk underwater and make themselves look beautiful, or like furry animals, dragons, or practically anything — or anyone — they wish.
This parallel universe, an online service called Second Life that allows computer users to create a new and improved digital version of themselves, began in 1999 as a kind of online video game.
But now, the budding fake world is not only attracting a lot more people, it is taking on a real world twist: big business interests are intruding on digital utopia. The Second Life online service is fast becoming a three-dimensional test bed for corporate marketers, including Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Sun Microsystems, Nissan, Adidas/Reebok, Toyota and Starwood Hotels."
I just checked and the 1,544,736 residents of Second Life have spent $652,081 real dollars in the last 24 hours in their virtual world.
Second Life - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
NPR : Second Life: Real Money in a Virtual World
